How to Make the World Add Up Quotes

“Once you do know what the question actually is, you’ll know what the answer means. • Deep Thought (a supercomputer in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“the feeling that they are. Psychologists have a name for our tendency to confuse our own perspective with something more universal: it’s called “naive realism,” the sense that we are seeing reality as it truly is, without filters or errors.9 Naive realism can lead us badly astray when we confuse our personal perspective on the world with some universal truth. We are surprised when an election goes against us: Everyone in our social circle agreed with us, so why did the nation vote otherwise? Opinion polls don’t always get it right, but I can assure you they have a better track record of predicting elections than simply talking to your friends.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“The French satirist Molière once wrote, “A learned fool is more foolish than an ignorant one.” Benjamin Franklin commented, “So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables us to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“Psychologists call this “motivated reasoning.” Motivated reasoning is thinking through a topic with the aim, conscious or unconscious, of reaching a particular kind of conclusion. In a football game, we see the fouls committed by the other team but overlook the sins of our own side. We are more likely to notice what we want to notice.11”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“Before I repeat any statistical claim, I first try to take note of how it makes me feel. It’s not a foolproof method against tricking myself, but it’s a habit that does little harm and is sometimes a great deal of help. Our emotions are powerful. We can’t make them vanish, nor should we want to. But we can, and should, try to notice when they are clouding our judgment.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“Yes, it’s easy to lie with statistics—but it’s even easier to lie without them.*”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“I worry about a world in which many people will believe anything, but I worry far more about one in which people believe nothing beyond their own preconceptions.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“A lobby group seeking to deny the statistical evidence will always be able to point to some aspect of the current science that is not settled, note that the matter is terribly complicated, and call for more research. And these claims will sound scientific, even rather wise. Yet they give a false and dangerous impression: that nobody really knows anything.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“Nightingale and Farr concluded that poor sanitation had caused many of the deaths in the Crimean War hospitals, and that most military and medical professionals had failed to learn this lesson. The problem was much bigger than one war: it was an ongoing public health disaster in barracks, civilian hospitals and beyond. The pair began to campaign for better public health measures, tighter laws on hygiene in rented properties, and improvements to sanitation in barracks and hospitals across the country.”
― Tim Harford, How to Make the World Add Up : Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers

“Because torpedoes took some time to slice through the water to hit their target, the submarine’s periscope operator had swiftly to judge a ship’s speed and direction before firing the torpedo on an intercept course.”
― Tim Harford, How to Make the World Add Up : Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers

“I’ve argued that we need to be skeptical of both hype and hysteria. We should ask tough questions on a case-by-case basis whenever we have reason for concern. Are the underlying data accessible? Has the performance of the algorithm been assessed rigorously—for example, by running a randomized trial to see if people make better decisions with or without algorithmic advice? Have independent experts been given a chance to evaluate the algorithm? What have they concluded? We should not simply trust that algorithms are doing a better job than humans, nor should we assume that if the algorithms are flawed, the humans would be flawless.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“Onora O’Neill argues that if we want to demonstrate trustworthiness, we need the basis of our decisions to be “intelligently open.” She proposes a checklist of four properties that intelligently open decisions should have. Information should be accessible: that implies it’s not hiding deep in some secret data vault. Decisions should be understandable—capable of being explained clearly and in plain language. Information should be usable—which may mean something as simple as making data available in a standard digital format. And decisions should be assessable—meaning that anyone with the time and expertise has the detail required to rigorously test any claims or decisions if they wish to.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“John Maynard Keynes’s famous view about long-term forecasts: ‘About these matters there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatever. We simply do not know.”
― Tim Harford, How to Make the World Add Up : Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers

“For superforecasters, beliefs are hypotheses to be tested, not treasures to be guarded,’ wrote Philip Tetlock after the study had been completed. ‘It would be facile to reduce superforecasting to a bumper-sticker slogan, but if I had to, that would be it.’14”
― Tim Harford, How to Make the World Add Up : Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers

“very often we make mistakes not because the data aren’t available, but because we refuse to accept what they are telling us. For Irving Fisher, and for many others, the refusal to accept the data was rooted in a refusal to acknowledge that the world had changed.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“Agood chart isn’t an illustration but a visual argument,” declares Alberto Cairo near the beginning of his book How Charts Lie.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“certain truths can only be perceived through the statistical lens.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“great Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet. Quetelet was the person who popularized the idea of taking the “average” or “arithmetic mean” of a group, which was a revolutionary way to summarize complex data with a single number.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“Dazzle camouflage was intended to provoke misjudgments. More than a century later, it isn’t hard to see echoes of dazzle camouflage in infographics”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“Nightingale was the first woman to be made a fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. When her “slender form” wasn’t too busy gliding along the corridors, causing faces to “soften with gratitude,” she was spending her time in Scutari carefully compiling data about disease and death.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“Disbelief flowed more fluidly than belief. The experimental subjects found it much easier to argue against positions they disliked than in favor of those they supported. There was a special power in doubt.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“And it turns out that doubt is a really easy product to make.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“They manufactured doubt.[14] A secret industry memo later reminded insiders that “doubt is our product.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“the cigarette companies were already aware that the science was starting to look pretty bad for them. They met to figure out how to respond to this looming crisis. Their answer was—alas—quite brilliant, and it set the standard for propaganda ever since. They muddied the waters.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“This statistical cynicism is not just a shame—it’s a tragedy.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“It’s not that we feel every statistic is a lie, but that we feel helpless to pick out the truths.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“Statistics show us things we cannot see in any other way.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“The tweet could be understood only as a salvo in a politically polarized battle about responsible mask use in which neither tribe was interested in figuring out the truth.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“Another billion people have more than $10,000 but less than $100,000; they own about $45 trillion among them. The remaining 3.2 billion adults have only $6.2 trillion, less than $2,000 each on average. Many of them have much less than that average. Very roughly speaking, the richest half a billion people have most of the money in the world, and the next billion have the rest. The handful of eighty-five staggeringly wealthy super-billionaires are still just a handful, so they own less than 1 percent of this total.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics